A roadmap for bigger issues
Up, up and away for Petra Dersch (59) as she takes the lift to Münster University Hospital’s East Tower. Her destination is the café on the 21st floor, with its panoramic view – an ideal place to talk about her life (and she explicitly makes no distinction between her life and her work). She is not only a member of the Faculty of Medicine, although she is a microbiologist. For many years, she has been looking beyond her Institute and the University in her voluntary work in various bodies and institutions, e.g. the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Leibniz Association and the Leopoldina. This work as a specialist giving advice and support is a recurring theme in Dersch’s professional life. In February she extended it when the Science and Humanities Council admitted her to its ranks. It means that she is now involved, at the highest national level, in advising politicians on bigger issues relating to the development of science and tertiary education.
“It’s a great honour for me,” she says. How exactly it came about, Dersch cannot explain. “All I can say is that the DFG asked if I could imagine taking it on.” Some months later – and she had almost forgotten the nomination – a special letter arrived: from the Federal President, with her nomination. Although such engagement is increasingly important for her – above all due to the increasing pressures on democracy and on scientific freedom – she never explicitly planned it that way, she says. But two things provided a major impulse. Firstly, a setback at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Brunswick, where she had taken on too much responsibility too early – “without understanding the working method and strategy,” she recalls, “which meant that I fell flat on my face.” And secondly, her appointment to a Review Board at the DFG. From these two events, Dersch concluded that she had a reputation in her field, but that she still had to learn how to act more strategically.
In this she has clearly succeeded. Within the DFG she helps shape funding for German research and can set priorities, as well as providing support for projects and structures in line with the Excellence campaign. As a member of the Science and Humanities Council – which, unlike the DFG, is not a funding institution and provides no money – she is active on the Research Committee and the Medical Review Board, drawing up data-based recommendations for politicians for the development of science in Germany. Any preparatory work she needs to do, she does mostly in the evenings or at weekends so that one thing doesn’t suffer: her research work.
“I’m fascinated by the ingenious tricks and the efficiency with which pathogenic bacteria manipulate our highly complex immune system and trigger infections,” says Dersch, who did research in, among other places, Boston, Berlin and Brunswick. Her scientific role model, she says, is Marie Skłodowska Curie, who recognised that research might be laborious and exhausting but it is nonetheless the best work in the world. The work of the Science and Humanities Council is also laborious – or, as Dersch says, “thorough” – and takes up a lot of time, but the work is highly regarded, she explains. Especially with regard to science, to funding and systemic issues, she hopes that politicians will act in an innovative, reliable and long-term way.
Considering all her engagement and her achievements, one side of herself which Dersch reveals in our conversation is entirely unexpected: she sometimes has selfdoubts. Whether she has really deserved all the awards and appointments; and how it could happen that she dined with the Federal President; or that she was there when her friend and colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020. Petra Dersch is certainly able and willing to name her strengths: organisational talent, hard work and creativity, for example. But her self-doubts show that she doesn’t take all this for granted. “I don’t come from an academic family, and I didn’t start studying with the aim of becoming a professor,” she declares. Although she had no clear roadmap, she still noticed at an early stage, again and again – despite setbacks and misfortunes – what she was capable of and what she wanted: to do research, make plans and show her commitment to science.
André Bednarz
This article is from the brochure "Twelve months, twelve people", published in February 2025.
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